Quicksilver’s Jitkoff moves on to Google Quick Search Box

The man responsible for Quicksilver, Nicholas Jitkoff, has left what used to …

Nicholas Jitkoff and Dave MacLachlan have taken the wraps off the project they've been working on for the past year. Dubbed "Quick Search Box," it aims to combine the speed and ease of Quicksilver with the breadth of Spotlight plus Google combined.

Longtime Quicksilver users will recognize Jitkoff as the developer of the much-lauded utility. Quicksilver is often praised for its ability to give users quick access to data, applications, and more. Its clever shortcuts and user interaction have earned the app praise, such as this comment from user compulsiveguile: "I was having a discussion with one of my friends the other day about how 'naked' I feel when I have a Mac and no Quicksilver. It's just... weird."

However, Jitkoff says that he has open-sourced the code for Quicksilver and put his effort towards QSB. "It is up to others whether they want to continue developing on that code base," he told Ars in an interview.

"There were limitations to the way Quicksilver works that would make certain types of functionality very difficult to do, particularly anything that involves text entry—like handling URLs or typing search queries," he said. "Quicksilver and Quick Search Box are both focused on search, but QSB is going to try to search everything—something QS wouldn't be able to scale well to do."

For example, "QS had to have a dedicated text-entry mode that had to be invoked, and the search the web functionality was a bit of an afterthought," Jitkoff told Ars. "But, URL entry is hugely useful for me, especially with website suggestion. It lets you search against any site and use QSB as both a search box and a location bar, the way that Chrome does, but this layers contacts and personal data on top of the rather web-related results you'd get from a location bar alone."

Just a couple characters bring up near-instant results.

The basic interface is quite simple. After Quick Search Box is launched, hitting the shortcut—the default is double-tapping the command key—brings up the box. Typing starts instantly bringing up results, à la Spotlight. "The intended behavior is that you do a search, we give you the best five results we can, and you can scroll past the first page to get at all the Spotlight and other results," said Jitkoff. If you scroll past the top five results, and choose something else, QSB remembers your choice. Then you can hit enter, which will launch an application to handle whatever result is found, or hit Tab to get a list of further options.

For instance, typing "jacqui" pulls up Jacqui Cheng's contact data, and hitting tab gives the option to send and e-mail, start a chat, or open her card in Address Book. Typing "e" or down-arrow, and hitting enter will open Mail with a blank e-mail addressed appropriately.

Pick one of the results, hit Tab, and you're presented with several actions to take on that result.

"We are trying to extend the tab interaction to anything, simply as meaning 'search here.' So using it on a directory will search the contents of that directory; on a person will show their contact info or let you communicate with them; on an app will show the related data or recent documents," Jitkoff told Ars. The trick also works when searching the web—typing "arstechnica.com TAB keyword" will search just Ars for your intended keyword. Keyboard shortcuts will also limit Google searching to images, docs, or mail.

As mentioned earlier, QSB can leverage Mac OS X's Spotlight index for content instead of re-indexing all your data, though in this early preview that is turned off by default. However, "We have faster indexes for contacts, applications, Google Docs, and a few other frequently accessed things," said Jitkoff. Also, "anything you choose from below the fold is learned though, so while it may take a while to find a document the first time, it moves into an in-memory index, and has near instantaneous re-access."

The preview is intended mainly for developers at this point, though. I experienced several crashes while testing, and Jitkoff said there are still plenty of improvements to be made. "A lot interaction questions are really hard to answer, so I wanted to get it out into people's hands so we could get it right, he said. And, "I'm still able to type faster than it can respond, and that is something I care about addressing." Also, a plug-in architecture is included, so being able to search your Facebook friends or your Disqus comments could be implemented with a plug-in. "We've implemented enough plug-ins to give a taste of what is possible," Jitkoff told Ars.

The Quick Search Bar preview is available to download from the project's Google Code page. And, since it is open source (under a New BSD license) you can also download the code or even contribute to the project. Jitkoff told Ars that new builds will be coming frequently as the app takes shape. So far, it's shaping up rather nicely.